This past fall NASA scientists discovered a large red blob on a national map hovering over northwest New Mexico -- a problem, they thought, with their display. But what they'd stumbled onto was actually America's biggest methane cloud -- located directly above a landscape checkered with coal gasfields.

Now that climate-destroying plume could get bigger and give the area an even darker black eye: The Bureau of Land Management wants to OK a crude-oil pipeline whose 50,000 barrel-per-day capacity could quadruple oil and gas fracking in the region.

The Four Corners is already riddled by decades of oil, gas and coal pollution. Communities have suffered, and endangered fish like the Colorado pikeminnow have been poisoned. The Piñon Pipeline and its fracking would magnify those problems and threaten to industrialize ancestral Indian lands, including Chaco Canyon -- a World Heritage Site once a center of Ancestral Puebloan civilization.